About This Edition and Introduction

About This Edition

This book gives the complete Urdu text and a new English translation of *Nasr-e-Benazir* ("Benazir in Prose") by Mir Bahadur Ali Husaini. It is a prose retelling of *Sihr-ul-Bayan* ("The Magic of Eloquence"), the famous *masnavi* of Mir Hasan of Delhi, which tells the love story of Prince Benazir and Princess Badr-e-Munir.

Source of the Urdu text: Urdu Wikisource (ur.wikisource.org), the page نثر بے نظیر and its section pages, downloaded in October 2026. The title page says that the book was written for the New College (the College of Fort William, Calcutta) by order of John Gilchrist, in the time of the Governor General the Marquess Wellesley, and printed in 1803 (1218 AH) at the Hindustani Press of Munshi Aftab-ud-Din.

What is left out and what was changed: every part of the author's text is given, in his order, including the title page. The section titles are the author's own opening lines. Each two sections of the source make one chapter here. The verse lines, which the online text sets one per line, have been paired into couplets, the verse markers have been removed, and some very long paragraphs have been divided. Nothing modern has been added to the Urdu.

Copyright: the book was written in 1802 and printed in 1803, and the author's death falls long before 1961. The text is therefore in the public domain in Pakistan, India and the United States. The English translation is new. Translator's notes are marked [TN: …]. Persian and Arabic verses and phrases are translated, with the language noted in square brackets. Many of the author's verses are taken from Mir Hasan's poem; they are translated line for line, for sense rather than rhyme.

Names are spelled in one way throughout: Benazir; Badr-e-Munir; Najm-un-Nisa, the vizier's daughter; Mah Rukh the fairy; Firoz Shah, prince of the jinn; Mas'ud Shah, king of Sarandip; Ishq Bai; the horse Falak Sair; Mir Hasan; Fairyland (Paristan); Mount Qaf. A glossary of the Urdu, Persian, Arabic and Hindi terms kept in the translation is given at the end.

Introduction

Mir Hasan's *Sihr-ul-Bayan*, written in the late eighteenth century, is one of the best-loved long poems in Urdu. At the College of Fort William in Calcutta, founded to teach the languages of India to the East India Company's officers, John Gilchrist set Indian writers to produce readable prose books in Urdu. Mir Bahadur Ali Husaini, writing for the college, retold Mir Hasan's story in prose, and his preface dates the work to 1217 AH (1802), in the reign of the emperor Shah 'Alam. He tells us that he had already written the same story in an easy style for beginners, and that this version is in the idiom of polite speech.

The story is a fairy tale. A long-awaited prince, Benazir, is carried off from his father's palace roof by the fairy Mah Rukh, who falls in love with him. She lets him ride out each night on a flying horse, and so he finds the garden of Princess Badr-e-Munir. The two fall in love, the jealous fairy shuts him in a well, and Badr-e-Munir's friend Najm-un-Nisa goes out as a wandering *jogan* to look for him. Her music wins the heart of Firoz Shah, a prince of the jinn, who finds and frees Benazir, and the tale ends with two weddings and a homecoming.

The author keeps the shape of the poem but expands it in rhymed, ornate prose, and he quotes Mir Hasan's couplets, other verses and many proverbs along the way. His long descriptions of gardens, jewels, music, feasts and weddings are a rich record of the courtly life of North India in his time. The translation follows his text closely, his wordplay included, with notes where a pun or a custom needs explaining.